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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000015- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
16 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
17 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
18 placed on a list index.
19
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000020- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
21 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
22 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
23 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
24
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000025- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
26 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
27 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
28 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
29 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
30 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
31 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
32
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000033- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
34 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
35 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
36 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
37 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
38
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000039- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
40 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000041
42- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
43 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
44 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
45 #693195.)
46
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000047- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
48 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000049
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000050- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000051 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000052 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
53 interpreter executions, would fail.
54
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000055- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000056 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000057 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000058
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000059Extension modules
60-----------------
61
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000062- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
63 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
64 and Greg Chapman.)
65
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000066- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
67 recursively.
68
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000069- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000070 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
71 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
72 leaks.
73
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000074- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
75
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000076- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
77 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
78 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
79 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
80 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
81 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
82 #705836.
83
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000084- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
85 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
86
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000087- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
88 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
89 See SF bug #692416.
90
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000091- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
92 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
93
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000094- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
95 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
96 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000097
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +000098- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
99 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
100 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
101 timeouts to work properly.
102
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000103Library
104-------
105
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000106- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
107 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
108
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000109- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
110 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
111 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
112
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000113- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000114 MS Office extensions.
115
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000116- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
117 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
118
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000119- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
120 execution speed of expressions and statements.
121
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000122- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
123 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
124 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
125 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
126 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
127 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
128
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000129- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
130 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
131 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000132
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000133- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
134 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
135 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
136
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000137- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
138
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000139Tools/Demos
140-----------
141
142TBD
143
144Build
145-----
146
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000147- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
148 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000149
150C API
151-----
152
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000153- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.
154
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000155- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000156 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
157
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000158- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
159 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
160 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000161
162New platforms
163-------------
164
165TBD
166
167Tests
168-----
169
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000170- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
171 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000172
173Windows
174-------
175
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000176- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
177 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000178
179Mac
180---
181
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000182- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
183 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000184
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000185- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
186 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000187
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000188- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
189 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
190 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000191
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000192- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000193 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
194 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000195
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000196- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
197 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000198
199
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000200What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
201=================================
202
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000203*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000204
205Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000206-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000207
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000208- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
209 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
210 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
211
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000212- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
213 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
214 (SF patch #664376.)
215
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000216- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
217 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
218 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
219 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
220 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
221 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000222 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000223
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000224- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
225 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
226 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
227 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000228 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000229
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000230- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
231 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
232 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
233 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
234 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
235 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
236 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
237 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
238 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
239 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
240 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
241
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000242- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
243 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
244 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
245 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
246 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
247 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
248
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000249- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
250 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
251
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000252- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
253 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
254 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
255 case.)
256
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000257- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
258 passed as unicode strings.
259
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000260- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
261 See SF bug #683467.
262
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000263- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
264 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
265
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000266- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
267
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000268- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
269
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000270- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
271 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
272 arguments.
273
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000274- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
275 See SF bug #667147.
276
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000277- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000278 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000279 See SF bug #676155.
280
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000281- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000282 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000283 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
284 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
285 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
286 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
287 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
288 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000289
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000290Extension modules
291-----------------
292
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000293- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
294 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
295 tp_as_number pointer.
296
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000297- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
298 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
299 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
300 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
301 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
302
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000303- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
304
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000305- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
306
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000307- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000308 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000309 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
310 patch #678531.)
311
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000312- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
313 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
314
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000315- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
316 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
317
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000318- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
319
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000320- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
321 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
322 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
323
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000324- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
325
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000326- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
327 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
328
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000329- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000330
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000331- datetime changes:
332
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000333 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
334
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000335 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
336 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
337 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
338 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
339 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
340 now.
341
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000342 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000343 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
344 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000345
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000346 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000347 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000348 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
349 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
350 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
351 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000352
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000353 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
354 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
355 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000356 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
357
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000358 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
359 by a later example coded by Guido.
360
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000361 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000362 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
363 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
364 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000365 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
366 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
367
368 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
369 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
370 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
371 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
372 tzinfo subclass instance.
373
374 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
375 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
376 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
377 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
378 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
379 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
380 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
381 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000382
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000383 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
384 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
385 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
386 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
387 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000388 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
389
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000390 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000391
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000392 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
393 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
394 as a naive datetime object.
395
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000396 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
397 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
398 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
399
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000400 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
401 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
402 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
403 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
404 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
405 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
406 comparison.
407
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000408 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
409 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
410 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
411 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000412 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000413
414 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000415
416 and ::
417
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000418 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
419
420 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
421 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
422 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
423 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
424
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000425 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
426 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
427 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
428 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
429 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
430
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000431 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
432 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000433 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
434 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000435
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000436Library
437-------
438
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000439- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
440 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
441
442- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
443 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
444 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
445 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
446 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
447 See PEP 307 for details.
448
449- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
450 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
451
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000452- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
453 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000454 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000455 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
456 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000457 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000458
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000459- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
460 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
461
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000462- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
463 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
464 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
465
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000466- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
467
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000468- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
469 exception.
470
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000471- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
472 class.
473
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000474- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
475 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
476 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
477
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000478- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
479 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
480
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000481- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000482 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
483 See SF bug #659228.
484
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000485- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
486 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
487 See SF patch #651082.
488
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000489- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000490
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000491- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
492 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
493
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000494- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000495 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000496
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000497- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
498 DOS paths from other platforms.
499
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000500Tools/Demos
501-----------
502
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000503- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
504 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
505 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
506 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
507 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
508 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
509 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
510 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
511 example:
512
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000513 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
514 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000515
516 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
517
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000518
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000519Build
520-----
521
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000522- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
523 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
524 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000525 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
526
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000527 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
528
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000529- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
530 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
531 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
532 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
533 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
534 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
535 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
536 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
537 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
538
539- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
540 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
541 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
542 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
543
544- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
545 from the Tools/scripts directory.
546
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000547C API
548-----
549
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000550- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
551 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000552
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000553- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
554 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
555 tp_as_number pointer.
556
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000557- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
558 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
559 (SF #681367)
560
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000561- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
562 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
563 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
564 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000565
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000566Tests
567-----
568
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000569- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000570 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
571 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
572 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
573 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
574 pydoc.)
575
576- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
577
578- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000579
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000580Windows
581-------
582
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000583- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
584 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
585 time).
586
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000587- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
588 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
589
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000590- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
591 release without strong cryptography.
592
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000593- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000594 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000595
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000596- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
597 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
598
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000599Mac
600---
601
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000602- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
603 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000604
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000605- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
606 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
607 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000608
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000609- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
610 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000611
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000612- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
613 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
614 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
615 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000616
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000617- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000618 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
619 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
620 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000621
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000622
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000623What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000624=================================
625
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000626*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000627
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000628Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000629--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000630
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000631- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
632
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000633- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
634 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000635 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000636 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000637 a different meaning than before.
638
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000639- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000640 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000641 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000642
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000643- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000644 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000645 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000646
647- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
648 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
649 and deallocation.
650
651- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
652 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
653
654- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
655 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
656 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
657 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
658 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
659
660- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
661 now detected by the garbage collector.
662
663- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
664 [SF bug 519621]
665
666- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
667 identifier.
668
669- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
670 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
671 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
672 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
673 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
674 [SF bug 563060]
675
676- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
677 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
678 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
679 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
680 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
681
682- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
683 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
684 not called. [SF bug #537450]
685
686- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
687
688- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
689 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
690 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
691 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
692 state of the slots would be lost.)
693
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000694Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000695-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000696
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000697- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000698 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
699 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
700 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
701 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000702 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
703 Jython 2.1.
704
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000705- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000706 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000707 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
708 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
709 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
710 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
711 these, see PEP 302.
712
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000713- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
714 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
715 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
716
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000717- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
718 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
719 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
720
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000721- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
722 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
723 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
724
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000725- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
726 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
727 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
728 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
729 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
730 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
731 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
732 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
733 releases or implementations.
734
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000735- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000736 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
737 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000738
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000739- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
740 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
741
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000742- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
743 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
744 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
745
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000746- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
747 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
748
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000749- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
750 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000751 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
752 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000753
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000754- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
755 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
756 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
757 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
758 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
759
760 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
761 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
762 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
763 pattern.
764
765 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
766 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
767 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
768 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
769
770 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
771 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
772 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
773 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
774 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
775 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
776
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000777- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
778 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
779 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
780 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
781 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
782 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
783 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
784 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000785
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000786- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
787 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
788 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
789 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
790 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000791 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
792 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
793 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
794 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
795 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
796 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
797 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000798
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000799- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
800 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
801
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000802- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
803 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
804 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
805 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
806 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
807 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
808 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
809 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
810 to Zack Weinberg!
811
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000812- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
813 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
814 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
815 type. This has been fixed now.
816
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000817- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
818 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
819 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
820
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000821- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
822 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
823 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
824 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
825 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
826 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
827 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
828 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000829 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000830
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000831- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
832 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
833 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000834
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000835- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
836 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
837 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
838 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
839 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
840 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
841 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
842 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000843 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000844 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
845 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
846
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000847- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
848 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
849 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
850 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
851 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
852 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
853 this.)
854
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000855- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
856 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000857 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000858 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000859 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
860 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000861 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
862 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000863
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000864- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
865 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
866 currently running.
867
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000868- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
869 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
870 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
871 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
872
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000873- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
874 as directory names.
875
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000876- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
877 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
878
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000879- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
880 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
881
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000882- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000883 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
884 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000885
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000886- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
887 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
888 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
889 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
890 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
891
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000892- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
893 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
894 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
895 removed.
896
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000897- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
898 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
899 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
900
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000901- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
902 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
903 to __debug__.
904
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000905- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
906 string to the left with zeros. For example,
907 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
908
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000909- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
910 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
911 deprecated now.
912
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000913- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
914 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
915 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000916
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000917- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
918 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
919 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
920 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
921 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000922
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000923- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
924 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
925
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000926- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
927 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
928 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000929 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000930 is backward compatible.
931
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000932- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
933 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
934 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
935 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
936 could access a pointer to freed memory.
937
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000938- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
939 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
940 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
941 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
942 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
943 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000944
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000945- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
946 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
947
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000948- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
949 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
950
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000951- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
952 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
953 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
954 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
955 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
956
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000957- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
958 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
959 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
960
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000961- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000962 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
963
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000964- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
965 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
966 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000967
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000968- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
969 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
970
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000971- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
972 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
973 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
974
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000975- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
976
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000977Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000978-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000979
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000980- Added three operators to the operator module:
981 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
982 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
983 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
984
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000985- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
986
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000987- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
988 archives.
989
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000990- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
991 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
992 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
993
994 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
995
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000996- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
997 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
998 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000999 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001000
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001001- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1002 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1003 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1004 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001005 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1006 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1007 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1008 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001009
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001010- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1011 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001012
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001013- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1014
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001015- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1016 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1017
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001018- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1019 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1020 supported.
1021
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001022- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1023
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001024- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1025 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001026
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001027- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1028 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1029
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001030- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1031
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001032- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1033 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1034
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001035- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1036 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1037 functions but callable type objects.
1038
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001039- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001040 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001041 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001042
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001043- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1044 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001045
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001046- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1047 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001048
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001049- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1050 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1051 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1052 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1053
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001054- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1055 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001056
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001057- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1058 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1059 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1060 and __imul__.
1061
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001062- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001063 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1064 is called.
1065
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001066- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1067 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1068 interpreter was compiled.
1069
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001070- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1071 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1072 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001073 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001074 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1075 1, not 2.
1076
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001077- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1078 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1079 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1080 limit.
1081
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001082- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1083 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1084 bug #623464.
1085
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001086- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1087 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1088 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1089 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1090
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001091Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001092-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001093
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001094- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1095
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001096- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1097 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1098 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1099 with Python 2.3a2.
1100
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001101- os.path exposes getctime.
1102
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001103- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001104 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001105 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001106 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001107 unit tests of floating point results.
1108
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001109- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1110 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1111 has been increased.
1112
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001113- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1114 executed.
1115
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001116- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1117 postinstallation script.
1118
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001119- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1120 test the current module.
1121
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001122- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001123 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1124 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1125 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1126 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1127
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001128- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001129 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001130 Ward's Optik package.
1131
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001132- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1133 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1134 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1135 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1136
1137- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1138 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001139 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001140
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001141- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1142 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1143 shelf are binary pickles.
1144
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001145- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1146 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1147
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001148- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1149 modules are iterators now.
1150
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001151- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1152 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1153 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1154 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1155 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1156 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001157
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001158- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1159 with their entity value.
1160
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001161- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1162
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001163- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1164 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001165
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001166- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1167 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001168 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001169
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001170- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1171 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1172 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1173 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1174 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1175 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1176 main():
1177
1178 import locale
1179 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1180
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001181- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1182 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1183
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001184- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1185 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1186 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1187 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1188 to the new standard.
1189
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001190- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1191 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1192 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1193 an extension to the database.
1194
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001195- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1196 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1197 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1198 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001199 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001200
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001201- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001202 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001203
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001204- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1205 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1206 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1207 bounded integers.
1208
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001209- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1210 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1211 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1212 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1213 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1214 in existence.
1215
1216 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1217 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1218 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1219 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1220 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1221 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1222
1223 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1224 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1225 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1226 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1227
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001228- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1229 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1230 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1231
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001232- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1233
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001234- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1235 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1236 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1237 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1238
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001239- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1240 argument.
1241
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001242- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1243 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1244 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1245 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1246 [SF patch 560794].
1247
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001248- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1249 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1250 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001251 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1252 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1253 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001254
1255- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1256 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001257
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001258- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1259 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1260 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1261 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001262
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001263- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1264 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1265 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1266 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1267 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1268
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001269- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001270
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001271- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1272
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001273- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1274 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1275 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1276 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1277 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1278 identical to None.
1279
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001280- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1281 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1282 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1283 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1284 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1285 results now.
1286
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001287- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1288 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1289
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001290- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1291 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1292 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1293 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1294 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1295 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1296 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1297 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1298
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001299- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1300
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001301- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1302 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1303
1304- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1305 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1306 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1307 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1308 and other systems.
1309
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001310- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1311 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1312 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1313 UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
Marc-André Lemburg4179a012002-04-05 12:15:05 +00001314 work well with these.
1315
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001316- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1317
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001318- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001319 connections.
1320
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001321- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1322 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1323 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1324
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001325- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1326 sets
1327
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001328- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1329 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1330 name.
1331
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001332- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1333 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1334 passed in.
1335
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001336- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001337 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001338 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1339 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001340
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001341- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1342
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001343- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1344
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001345- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1346 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1347 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1348
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001349- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1350 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1351 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1352 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001353 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001354
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001355- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001356 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001357 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001358
1359- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1360 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1361 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1362
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001363- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001364 the value of its expression argument.
1365
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001366- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1367 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1368 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1369
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001370- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1371 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1372 skipstone browser was included.
1373
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001374- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1375 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1376
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001377Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001378-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001379
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001380- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1381 names in addition to accepting file names.
1382
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001383- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1384 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1385 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1386 still used and useful.)
1387
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001388- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1389 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1390 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1391 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001392
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001393- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1394 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1395 the generated binary.
1396
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001397Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001398-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001399
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001400- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1401
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001402- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1403 except in the hands of experts.
1404
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001405- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001406 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1407 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1408 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001409
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001410- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1411 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1412 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1413 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1414 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1415 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1416 builds.
1417
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001418- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1419 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1420 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1421 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1422 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1423 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1424 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1425 new type.
1426
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001427- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001428
1429 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1430 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1431 positive infinities.
1432
1433 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1434 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1435 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1436 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1437 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1438 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1439 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1440
1441 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1442
1443 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1444
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001445- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1446 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1447 size of the executable.
1448
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001449- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1450 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1451 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1452 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001453
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001454- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1455
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001456- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1457 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1458 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001459
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001460- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1461 well as Unix.
1462
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001463- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1464 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1465 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1466 modules in the README file for details.
1467
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001468C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001469-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001470
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001471- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1472 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001473 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001474 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001475 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001476
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001477- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1478 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1479 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1480 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1481 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1482 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001483 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001484 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1485 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1486 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1487 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1488 aligned.)
1489
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001490- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1491 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1492 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1493
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001494- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1495 level.
1496
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001497- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1498 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1499 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1500 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1501 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1502
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001503- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1504 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1505 code.
1506
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001507- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1508 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1509 adjusting for negative indices.
1510
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001511- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1512 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1513 object.
1514
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001515- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1516 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1517 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1518
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001519- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1520 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001521
1522- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1523
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001524- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1525 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1526 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1527 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1528
1529- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1530
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001531- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001532
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001533- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001534 without going through the buffer API.
1535
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001536- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001537
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001538- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1539 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1540 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1541 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1542
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001543- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1544 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1545
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001546- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001547 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1548
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001549New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001550-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001551
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001552- OpenVMS is now supported.
1553
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001554- AtheOS is now supported.
1555
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001556- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1557
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001558- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1559
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001560Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001561-----
1562
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001563- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1564 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1565 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001566
1567Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001568-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001569
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001570- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1571 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1572 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1573 bugs.
1574 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001575 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001576 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1577 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001578 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001579
1580- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001581 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001582
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001583- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1584 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1585
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001586- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1587 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001588 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001589 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1590
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001591- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1592 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1593 use files" uninstall option).
1594
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001595- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1596
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001597- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1598 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1599
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001600- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1601 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1602 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1603
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001604- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1605 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1606 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1607 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1608 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001609 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1610 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1611 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001612
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001613- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001614 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001615 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1616 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1617 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1618 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1619 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1620 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1621 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1622 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1623 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1624 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1625 work around.
1626
1627- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1628 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1629 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1630 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1631 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1632 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1633 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1634 specified with O_CREAT too).
1635
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001636Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001637----
1638
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001639- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001640
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001641- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1642 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1643 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1644
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001645- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1646 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1647 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1648
1649- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1650 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1651 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1652 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1653 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1654 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1655 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1656 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001657
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001658- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1659 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1660 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001661
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001662- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1663 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1664 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1665 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1666 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001667
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001668- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1669 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1670 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001671
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001672- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1673 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001674
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001675- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1676 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1677 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1678 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1679 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001680
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001681- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1682 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1683 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1684
1685- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1686 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1687 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001688
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001689- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1690 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1691 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1692 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001693 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001694
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001695- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1696 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001697
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001698- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1699 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001700
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001701- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001702 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001703 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1704 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001705
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001706
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001707What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001708===============================
1709
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001710*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1711
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001712Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001713--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001714
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001715- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1716 with a custom metaclass.
1717
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001718Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001719-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001720
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001721- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1722 are proxies.
1723
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001724Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001725-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001726
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001727- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1728 very short strings.
1729
1730- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1731 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1732 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1733 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1734 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1735
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001736Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001737-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001738
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001739- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1740 close or delete time).
1741
1742- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1743 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1744
1745- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1746
1747- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001748 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001749
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001750Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001751-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001752
1753Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001754-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001755
1756C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001757-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001758
1759New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001760-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001761
1762Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001763-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001764
1765Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001766-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001767
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001768- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1769
1770- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1771 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1772
1773- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1774 deleted at process exit time.
1775
1776- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1777 in backslash.
1778
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001779Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001780----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001781
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001782- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1783 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1784 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1785
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001786
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001787What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001788===========================
1789
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001790*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1791
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001792Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001793--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001794
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001795- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1796 been extensively updated. See
1797
1798 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1799
1800 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1801
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001802- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1803 deleted!
1804
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001805- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1806 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1807 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1808 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1809 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1810
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001811- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1812
1813 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1814 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1815
1816 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1817 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1818 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1819 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1820 supported anyway.
1821
1822 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1823 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1824
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001825- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1826 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1827 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1828 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1829 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001830
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001831- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1832 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1833 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1834
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001835Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001836-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001837
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001838- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1839 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1840 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1841 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1842 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1843 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001844 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1845 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1846 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1847 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001848
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001849- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1850 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1851 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1852
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001853Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001854-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001855
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001856- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1857
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001858Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001859-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001860
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001861- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1862 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1863 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1864 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1865 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1866 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1867
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001868- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1869
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001870- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1871
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001872- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1873
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001874- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1875 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1876 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1877
1878- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1879
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001880Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001881-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001882
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001883- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1884 off a search on Google.
1885
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001886Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001887-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001888
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001889- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1890 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1891 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1892 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1893 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1894 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1895 other platforms should do likewise.
1896
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001897- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1898 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1899 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1900
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001901C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001902-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001903
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001904- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1905 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1906 producing key-value pairs.
1907
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001908- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001909 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001910 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1911 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1912 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1913 previously went unchallenged.
1914
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001915New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001916-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001917
1918Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001919-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001920
1921Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001922-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001923
1924Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001925----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001926
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001927- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1928 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001929
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001930- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1931 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1932 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1933 home.
1934
1935
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001936What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001937===========================
1938
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001939*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1940
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001941Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001942--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001943
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001944- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1945 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001946
1947 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001948 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001949
1950 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1951 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001952 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001953 This needs to be documented.
1954
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001955- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1956 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1957
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001958- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1959 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1960 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1961
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001962- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1963 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1964
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001965- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1966 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1967 class forbids it).
1968
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001969- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1970 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1971 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1972
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001973- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1974
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001975Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001976-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001977
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001978- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1979 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001980 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001981
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001982- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1983 (like 1 + '').
1984
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001985Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001986-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001987
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001988- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1989 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1990 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1991 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001992 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001993 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1994
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001995- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1996 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1997 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1998 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1999
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002000- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2001 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002002 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2003 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2004 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002005
2006- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2007 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002008
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002009- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2010 bytes on its input.
2011
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002012Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002013-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002014
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002015- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002016 convenience function.
2017
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002018- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2019 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2020 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002021 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2022 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2023 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2024 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2025 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2026 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002027
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002028- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2029 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2030 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2031 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2032
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002033- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2034 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2035 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2036
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002037- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2038 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2039 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2040 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2041
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002042- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2043 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002044 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002045 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2046 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2047 new -l and -e options.
2048
2049- statcache is now deprecated.
2050
2051- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2052 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002053 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002054 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2055 time properly taken into account.
2056
2057- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2058 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2059 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2060 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2061
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002062Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002063-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002064
2065Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002066-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002067
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002068- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2069 is built with libdb3 if available.
2070
2071- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2072
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002073C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002074-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002075
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002076- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2077 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2078 PySequence_Size().
2079
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002080- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2081
2082- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2083 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2084 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2085
2086- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2087 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2088
2089- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2090 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2091
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002092New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002093-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002094
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002095- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2096 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2097
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002098- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2099 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2100
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002101- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2102
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002103Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002104-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002105
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002106- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2107 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2108
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002109Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002110-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002111
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002112Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002113----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002114
2115- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2116 removed completely in the next release.
2117
2118- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2119 OSX.
2120
2121- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2122 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2123
2124- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2125
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002126
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002127What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002128===========================
2129
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002130*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2131
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002132Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002133--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002134
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002135- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002136 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002137 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002138 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2139 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002140 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2141 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002142 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2143 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002144
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002145- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2146 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2147
2148- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2149 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2150
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002151Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002152-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002153
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002154- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2155 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2156 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2157 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2158 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2159 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2160 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2161 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2162
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002163- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2164 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2165 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2166 example).
2167
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002168- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002169 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002170 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002171 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002172
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002173- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2174 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2175 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002176 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002177
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002178- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2179 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2180 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2181 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2182 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2183 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2184
2185 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2186
2187 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2188
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002189Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002190-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002191
2192- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2193
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002194- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2195
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002196- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2197 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002198
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002199- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2200 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2201 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2202 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2203 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2204 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002205 attributes.
2206
2207- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2208 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2209 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002210
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002211- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2212 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2213 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002214
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002215- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2216 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2217 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002218 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2219 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2220
2221- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2222 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002223
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002224Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002225-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002226
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002227- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2228 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2229
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002230- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2231 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2232 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2233 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2234
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002235- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2236 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2237 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2238 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2239
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002240 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2241 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2242 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2243 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2244 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2245 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2246 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2247 without losing information).
2248
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002249- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002250 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2251 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2252 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2253 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2254 module).
2255
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002256 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002257 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2258 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2259 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2260 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002261
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002262- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002263 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2264 encoding.
2265
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002266- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2267 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2268
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002269- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002270 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2271
2272- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2273 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2274 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2275 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2276
2277- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2278
2279- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2280 ON, and OFF.
2281
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002282- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2283 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2284
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002285Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002286-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002287
2288- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2289 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2290 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002291
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002292- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2293 been added: -X and -E.
2294
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002295Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002296-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002297
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002298- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2299 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2300
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002301C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002302-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002303
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002304- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2305 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2306 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2307 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2308 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2309
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002310- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2311 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2312 as long) arguments.
2313
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002314- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2315 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2316 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2317 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2318 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2319 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2320
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002321- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2322 input.
2323
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002324New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002325-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002326
2327Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002328-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002329
2330Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002332
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002333- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2334 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2335 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2336
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002337- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2338 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2339 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002340 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002341
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002342 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2343 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2344 import signal
2345 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002346
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002347 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002348 while 1:
2349 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002350 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002351 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2352 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2353 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2354 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002355
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002356
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002357What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2358===========================
2359
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002360*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2361
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002362Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002363--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002364
2365- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2366 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2367 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2368
2369- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2370 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2371 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2372 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2373 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2374 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2375 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002376
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002377- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002378 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002379 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2380 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2381 associate a docstring with a property.
2382
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002383- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2384 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2385 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2386 other built-in object types.
2387
2388- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2389 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2390 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2391 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2392 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2393
2394- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2395 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2396
2397- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2398 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002399 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002400 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2401 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2402 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2403 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2404 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2405
2406- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2407 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2408 class.
2409
2410- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2411 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2412 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2413 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2414
2415- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2416 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2417 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2418 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2419
2420- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2421 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2422
2423- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2424 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2425 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2426 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2427 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002428 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002429 with the same value as s.
2430
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002431- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2432
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002433Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002434----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002435
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002436- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2437
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002438- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2439 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2440 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2441 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2442 objects.
2443
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002444- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2445 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002446 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2447 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2448
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002449- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2450 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2451 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2452
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002453Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002454-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002455
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002456- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2457 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2458 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2459 by the instances.
2460
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002461- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2462 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2463 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2464
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002465- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2466 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2467 before the entire comparison is complete.
2468
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002469- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2470 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2471 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2472
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002473- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2474 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2475 getwriter().
2476
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002477- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2478 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2479
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002480- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002481 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2482 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2483
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002484- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2485 iterable object.
2486
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002487- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2488 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002489
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002490- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2491 authentication.
2492
2493- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2494 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002495
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002496- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002497 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2498 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2499 a sample driver.)
2500
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002501Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002502-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002503
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002504- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2505 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2506 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2507 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2508 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2509 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2510 kernel has large file support.
2511
2512- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2513 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2514 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2515 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2516 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2517
2518- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2519 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2520 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2521
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002522C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002523-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002524
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002525- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2526 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2527
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002528New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002529-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002530
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002531- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2532 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2533
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002534Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002536
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002537- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2538 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2539 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2540 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2541 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2542
2543- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2544 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2545 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2546 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2547
2548- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2549 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002551Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002552-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002553
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002554- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002555 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2556 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002557
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002558
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002559What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2560===========================
2561
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002562*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2563
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002564Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002565----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002566
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002567- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2568 big to represent as a C double.
2569
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002570- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2571 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2572 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2573 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2574 restriction).
2575
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002576- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2577 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2578 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2579 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2580 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2581
2582 >>> dir([])
2583 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2584 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2585 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2586 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2587 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2588 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2589 'reverse', 'sort']
2590
2591 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2592
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002593- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002594 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2595 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2596 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2597 OverflowError exception.
2598
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002599- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002600 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002601 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2602 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2603 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2604 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2605 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002606 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002607 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2608 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2609
2610 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2611 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2612 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2613 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002614
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002615- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002616 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2617 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2618 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2619 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2620 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2621 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2622 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2623 once it is created.
2624
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002625- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2626 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2627 (key, value) pairs.
2628
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002629- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002630 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2631 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2632
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002633- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2634 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2635 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2636 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2637 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002638
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002639- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002640 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2641 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2642
2643 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2644
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002645- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002646 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2647
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002648Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002650
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002651- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002652 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2653 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002654
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002655- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2656 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2657 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2658 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2659 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2660 in this area anymore).
2661
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002662- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2663 threading.Timer.
2664
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002665- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2666 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2667
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002668- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002669 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2670
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002671- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002672 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2673 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2674 converted to Python longs.
2675
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002676- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002677 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2678
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002679- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2680 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2681 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2682
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002683Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002684-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002685
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002686- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2687 division operators as per PEP 238.
2688
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002689Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002690-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002691
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002692- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2693 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2694 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2695 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2696
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002697C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002698-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002699
2700- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002701
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002702- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2703 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002704 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002706 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2707 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002708 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002709 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002710
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002711- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002712 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2713 module:
2714
2715 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002716
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002717 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2718 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002719
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002720 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2721 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002722
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002723 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2724
2725 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2726
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002727- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002728 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2729 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2730 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002731
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002732New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002733-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002734
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002735- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2736 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2737 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2738 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2739 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002740
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002741Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002742-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002743
2744Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002745-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002746
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002747- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2748 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2749 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2750 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002751 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2752 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2753 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2754 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2755 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002756
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002757- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002758 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2759
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002760
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002761What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2762===========================
2763
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002764*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2765
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002766Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002767-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002768
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002769- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2770 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2771
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002772- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2773 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2774 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002775
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002776- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2777 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2778 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2779 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002780
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002781- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002783- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002784
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002785Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002787
2788- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002789 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002790 the module docstring for details.
2791
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002792Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002793-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002794
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002795- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002796 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2797 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2798 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002799
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002800- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2801 Nick Mathewson.
2802
2803Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002805
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002806- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2807 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2808 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2809 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2810 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2811 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2812 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2813 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2814
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002815- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2816 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2817 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2818 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2819
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002820- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2821 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2822 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2823 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2824 come a long way).
2825
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002826- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2827 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2828 write filters for these warnings).
2829
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002830- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2831 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2832 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2833 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2834 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2835
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002836- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2837 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2838 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2839 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2840 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2841 older distribution.
2842
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002843Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002844-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002845
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002846- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2847 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002848 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002849
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002850- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2851 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2852 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2853
2854- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2855
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002856- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2857
2858- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2859
2860- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2861
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002862- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002863
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002864- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2865
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002866New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002868
2869C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002870-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002871
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002872- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2873 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2874 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2875 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2876 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2877 against buffer overruns.
2878
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002879- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002880 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2881 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002882 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2883 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2884 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2885
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002886- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2887 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2888 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2889 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2890 deprecated.
2891
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002892Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002894
2895- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2896 relevant is found.
2897
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002898
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002899What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002900===========================
2901
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002902*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2903
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002904Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002905----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002906
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002907- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2908 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2909 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2910 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2911 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2912 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2913 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2914 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002915 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002916 repaired.
2917
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002918- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002919 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002920 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2921 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2922 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2923 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2924 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2925 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2926 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2927 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2928
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002929- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2930 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2931 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2932 leading BMO character).
2933
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002934- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2935 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2936 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2937
2938 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2939 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2940 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002941
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002942 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2943 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2944 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2945 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2946 for various simple to use conversions.
2947
2948 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2949 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2950
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2952 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2953 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2954 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2955 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2956 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2957 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2958 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2959 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2960 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2961 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2962 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2963 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2964 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2965 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002966
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002967- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2968 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2969 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002970 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002971 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002972
2973 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002974 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2975 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2976 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2977 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2978 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002979 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2980 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002981
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002982 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2983 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2984 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002985 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002986
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002987- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2988 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2989 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2990 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2991 floating arithmetic,
2992
2993 x = 9007199254740992.0
2994 print long(x)
2995
2996 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2997 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2998 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2999 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3000 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3001 functions are of good quality).
3002
3003 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3004 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3005 algorithms to break.
3006
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003007- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3008 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3009 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3010 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3011 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3012 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3013 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3014 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3015 order.
3016
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003017- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3018 operation along the most common code paths.
3019
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003020- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3021 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3022
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003023- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3024 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3025 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3026 {}.update(UserDict())
3027
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003028- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3029 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3030 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3031 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3032 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3033 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3034 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3035 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3036
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003037- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003038 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003040 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003041 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3042 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003043 join() method of strings
3044 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003045 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3046 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003047 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003048 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003049
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003050- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3051 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3052
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003053- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3054 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3055
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003056- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3057 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3058 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3059 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3060
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003061- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3062 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003063 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003064 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3065 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003066
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003067- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3068
3069
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003070Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003072
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003073- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003074 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003075 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3076 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3077
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003078- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3079 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3080
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003081- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3082 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3083 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3084 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3085
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003086- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3087 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3088 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3089
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003090- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3091
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003092- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3093
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003094- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3095 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3096 that are still imported into string.py).
3097
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003098- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3099
3100- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3101 Now it does.
3102
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003103- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3104
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003105- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3106 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3107 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3108 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3109 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003110 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3111 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003112
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003113- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3114 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3115 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3116 'help(object)'.
3117
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003118Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003119-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003120
3121- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003122 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003123 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3124 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3125
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003126- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003127 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3128 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003129
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003130C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003132
3133- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3134 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135
3136----
3137
3138**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**